The Butt Ugly Weblog

Oh please

My foreign readers might not have heard about this, but a Lappish newspaper, Lapin Kansa, fired their editor-in-chief for being gay. Needless to say, this has created an uproar, including Facebook groups calling for boycott on the Alma Media group, owner of the newspaper, who allegedly offered 100,000 euros to the person in question to keep their mouth shut and just resign. Alma Media is a large media corporation in Finland, with a number of local newspapers and internet services. By the way, if you have your blog on Vuodatus.net, you are using Alma Media's blogging platform.

Anyhoo, normally this is one person's word against someone else's - but frankly, all the discussion around this is really clearly showing that not all is well in the State of Lapland. To quote the vicar of Simo (translation mine):

"Not many"? Lohi himself says that there are about 5000 old-skool Laestadians (a local fundamentalist Christian branch) in Lapland, and maybe 5000 more. Lapland has about 180,000 inhabitants, so that's approximately 5% of population. If you scale this up to entire country, you find maybe 100,000 Laestadians total, for a measly 2% of the population.

Now, it is hard to say exactly how much of the population is homosexual, but different estimates give it between 2-7%. I have even heard the number 10% being thrown around. At any rate, the gay population is actually as large as the Laestadians - probably even bigger. And based on my grantedly limited sample of both, I will much rather carry the flag of the lesbian agenda than these narrow-minded fundamentalist Christian bigots.

Personally I believe this was all about money. These fundamentalists might've stopped ordering the newspaper, if the editor had been gay. Alma Media blundered, and didn't realize that before they hired here. The company did not want to face that potential loss, so they hashed out a "cunning plan", which boiled over when their opponent chose not to play ball. They probably also calculated that any boycott on the gay-agenda-toting-people is less damage than damage from the fundamentalists' boycott, and that the publicity is always good anyway.

Our society is in a phase where money trumps ethic issues. This isn't necessarily bad, mind you, even though it sounds horrible. Because of that, consumers do have power to choose which ethics they want the society turn to, and vote with their wallets - both positively (like Carrot Mobs) and negatively (boycotts). The bad thing obviously is that those who have the money, get to choose the ethics, too, which makes this an unstable system: there are few corrective mechanisms to keep the situation balanced.